Childhood Inspirations
A topic discussed several times on and off on discord has been foundational texts (be it books, comics, movies, TV shows, whatever) that people have been exposed to as children or teens and how those help shape one's views of fantasy, sci-fi and the approach to those broad genres when it comes to TTRPGs.
This relates sort of to the Personal Appendix N bandwagon that was going on few months back, but that one was for current inspirations to one's gaming, whereas I am more interested in more foundational and broader influences. Here's hoping this starts off another bandwagon of its own.
For me, things that I read as a child and later as a young teen (before I started just reading straight up fantasy) that have held a long influence on my view of fantasy are these, in no particular order:
Tony Wolf's Books
Specifically his Bosco/The Woodland Folk series of books. Those were absolutely fundamental to a lot my love of fantasy over, say, sci-fi and to my tastes in it. While I do enjoy me an occasional grim and even dark kind of fantasy, I enjoy stuff with whimsy and color, while also having a certain edge to it. Characters in the Bosco books do get hurt, die and at one point - go to war. There is conflict, inventions, cool tech cooked up by the gnomes/dwarves and just all around fun stuff like that.
Fairy Tales and Myths for Children
This is a broad category, but I used to read a lot of books with fairy tales or retold myths and folklore from ancient Greece to China to of course Bulgarian stories. Those also shaped my ideas and interest in the fantastical, with warriors and magicians and fantastical beasts everywhere. My fascination with folk stories and myth persists to this day, as one can see from my various blogposts.
The Gummi Bears Show
A very odd Disney cartoon about...uh.....gummy bears. Except these ones are actual bears and they drink a potion that makes them bounce around a lot. I dunno man. But the show is excellently animated and had a similar mix of whimsy and danger as Tony Wolf's works, and was also something I was exposed to as a child and as such very much influenced my interest in fantasy and also in how fantasy looks (colorful. It looks colorful).
Donald Duck Comics
Another Disney yarn, but the Donald Duck comics were a huge inspiration to me as a kid. I would regularly buy (or my parents would) the Mickey Mouse and the Donald Duck comics and the Donald Duck ones were absolutely superior by far. They were smaller in dimensions, but thicker books and would often have much longer stories in them. Stories often involving adventures and travel and finding treasures, especially when Scrooge was involved. Later as a teenager I was also exposed to some of the more serialized Donald/Scrooge McDuck comic books, and those were even better. Duck Tales also very much counts in here, as the animated series absolutely took a lot from the comics.
Gamebooks
Specifically Bulgarian ones, as while I would have loved to have access to classics like Lone Wolf (which did have a few of its first books translated and released in Bulgarian, but I have certainly never ran into it) or the TSR ones, most of the gamebooks I could read as a kid were written by Bulgarian authors. Back in the 90s these were THE gateway I had into fantasy, moving onto RPGs and video games from there. And while gamebooks have had a bit of a renaissance of their own here, I'll admit I've not seen much use for them nowadays as an adult, despite my fondness for them. However they were probably my single biggest driver to get into gaming involving, well, books, and from there - roleplaying games.
So, what childhood media did you get exposed to that has shaped your view of fantasy and RPGs? If you do write a post about this, send me a link on discord or something, or I dunno - reference this post, maybe bearblog's analytics will ping off that and I can find your post and I'll add it here.
Other people talking about this
Havoc's Post which technically started the topic in the first place.